James Farrell
Latest from James Farrell
Amazon claims First Amendment protection for Alexa digital assistant – even in a murder case
Amazon.com Inc. is asserting its right not to hand over a user’s data in an Arkansas murder trial, stating that the First Amendment protects an individual’s right to privacy. Amazon was first approached by police in December, when it was revealed they were working on a case concerning a man, Victor Collins of Bentonville, Arkansas, ...
Google’s Waze makes hay with carpool service as the rain pours on Uber
As Uber Technologies Inc. is beset by a worsening sexual harassment scandal, Google Inc.’s new carpool service, Waze, is making hay. According to an article in The Wall Street Journal, Google is set to launch Waze in several U.S. cities and cities in Latin America in coming months. This follows successful testing of the Waze Carpool ...
Bill Gates hopes technology and education will break us out of our filter bubbles
Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates believes we are stuck inside “filter bubbles,” hardly making use of the wealth of information out there on the Internet, television and social media, our worldviews reinforced inside our own private echo chambers. But all is not lost, Gates said in a recent interview with Quartz. Gates, whose philosophizing on the ...
Uber vows investigation into new sexual harassment allegations, but criticism intensifies
Amid new accusations of sexual harassment inside Uber Technologies Inc. made by former engineer Susan Fowler, #DeleteUber is once again going the rounds. On its first time out of the blocks – dictated by anti-Trump fervor – it’s thought the hashtag resulted in the loss of about 200,000 customers. This time, it seems to have picked ...
Robots should be taxed when they eliminate jobs, says Bill Gates
The looming prospect of human jobs getting quickly replaced by robots and other automated processes has spurred a wide range of potential solutions, from a universal basic income to retraining. Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates has another idea: Tax the bots. In an interview with Quartz, Gates said such a robot tax would pay for creation of ...
New app from IBM can warn of bad weather even when network is down
A hurricane is on its way and it would be sensible to get out of its path. But the Internet is down, and you don’t know it’s coming to rip the roof off your house. This is a more likely scenario in developing nations than we’d like to imagine, according to IBM Corp., so this ...
Hello, LinkedIn: Facebook has just become a hiring hub for businesses
Despite boasting some 65 million local businesses visited by a billion users monthly, Facebook Inc. hasn’t yet offered a way for businesses to scout and hire staff — until now. The company on Wednesday announced it’s allowing businesses in the U.S. and Canada to post job openings. The launch follows a test last year when the company ...
Self-flying taxis to take to the skies of Dubai
Come July, autonomous flying taxis likely will be seen flying over Dubai’s skyline. Shortly after Tesla Motors Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk had regaled his audience at the World Government Summit in Dubai with stories about cyborgs and self-driving technology that will put a large chunk of the world’s workforce out of a job, ...
Elon Musk worries about a future of dangerous robots and unemployable humans
Multibillionaire tech maverick Elon Musk likes to talk about the future, a near future he has stated before will see humans displaced by robots. Speaking at the World Government Summit in Dubai on Monday, the chief executive of Tesla Motors Inc. covered a wide range of topics, including his concerns about the possibility of pernicious artificial intelligence, ...
Appeals court upholds halt to Trump’s immigration ban, and tech cheers
Thanks in no small part to the tech industry’s uprising, President Donald Trump’s controversial immigration and travel ban is dead — for now. On Thursday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco upheld a Seattle federal court’s hold on Trump’s immigration executive order to ban visitors from seven mainly Muslim ...